


How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fade

by kerricarri



Series: a cosmic horror love story [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: A Cosmic Horror Story, Alternate Origin Story, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Being a Mage Sucks, Character Study, Clan Lavellan Dies, Dalish History and Culture, Demons, Eldritch Abominations, Eventual Female Lavellan/Cullen Rutherford, Fade Shenanigans, Fuck the fade, Implied Rape/Non-con, Insanity, Mind Rape, Minor Character Death(s), POV Second Person, Pre-Inquisition, Templars, The Inquisition is fucked if this is their Herald, Trauma, Warning: The Fade, What Have I Done, What if?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-10
Updated: 2017-05-12
Packaged: 2018-10-26 17:53:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10791702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerricarri/pseuds/kerricarri
Summary: That time a young Lavellan meets an eldritch abomination and goes quietly insane.Mature content inside. Scratch that, extremely disturbing content inside. Mind the tags, please, and leave your sanity at the door.Because this is a universe in which the Inquisition can try and make a demon-worshipping blood mage its Herald. This is a world where baby Lavellen can grow up to be a monster.





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Introducing Clan Lavellan, that clan all others must disown.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reading Part 1 of the series isn't necessary to understand this fic, as this one stands alone.
> 
> Normally I love me some Lavellan/Cullen fluff wherein he blushes a lot, they get a dog, and they build a house together on some Ferelden farm. In that world Lavellan would be some sweet doe-eyed innocent thing and he'd be gentle with her a lot. 
> 
> Suffice to say this is not that universe.

At the tender age of six you begin to show signs of the Fade. At first your parents are at a loss as to what to do, so out of their depths are they at handling a child who cannot control her powers. They are not mages. They are busy warriors, the only two scouts of the clan. And though they try, though they love you, it soon becomes clear that they cannot help you.

 

There hasn't been a mage born to Clan Lavellan in years due to dwindling population numbers. Your clan is dying. Decades earlier there had been a massacre; few can remember the purge. In the Free Marches, few city elves can cite it as anything other than uncomfortable historical fact while the event itself is remembered even less by the shemlen—ironic, all things considered. But for Clan Lavellan it is particularly difficult to recall this piece of Dalish history precisely because yours was the clan chosen, desecrated, and made an example of so long ago. To this day your clan hasn't recovered while other Dalish elves avoid your own, as if to prevent the bad luck from catching. You are pariahs to be subtly shunned among your own.

 

But your Keeper can remember. Decades ago she may have only been a child, but today? She is the last surviving mage to have escaped the purge. This is why she is cherished by the clan, venerated above all other leaders to have come before. Even the other clans that ostracize your own have to respect her. This is why every ten years onward she and her people are still invited to the Arlathvhen.

 

This is why you are brought before her now. Your parents know the value of you; your Keeper understands it even more. But it is only when they are finally beside themselves in trying to raise you that they beseech Deshanna to take you in and raise you in their stead.

 

She does so only upon one condition. They agree.

 

And so you take on your Keeper's name. So promptly does she begin your training, with the tacit understanding that you are to be the First. You are to succeed her. But that's due less to your own merit than to the accident of birth as well as circumstances forced upon the clan. To this day you will always regret not having a choice in it at all.

 

Still, your teacher understands how to instruct you in your powers while your parents go about their business and back to scouting, distraction-free.

 

Life is a tedium of studies and sweat in between the typical chores: fishing, mending, hunting, foraging. The wet and warm humidity of summer trees is all you know. The Free Marches are where you constantly roam. This is your ancestral home, which is why the clan will never flee despite its history. There are no borders and boundaries beyond these mountains and thresholds, this sea, these forests worth knowing. Or at least that's what your Keeper says. That's what they all say. All you know is that you want to leave.

 

No forays into the city-states beyond are allowed. There will be no slinking into villages or skirting busy towns in the midst of harvest days, feast days, celebratory events. The warm glow of festival lights and torches are not for you. These bonfires are not meant for you. The Dalish do not dance and sing in the crackling light of roaring flames. They are of the People, glorious and dignified, and so huddle together in the darkness instead. And so in the shadows, in the unceasing darkness, you dwell. Because light attracts attention during long winter nights. Light attracts danger. Yet when low burning embers are one's only means of warmth, one grows cold. The night is long and you feel alone.

 

Eventually comes the year you turn fourteen. You are preparing busily to finally to take on the mantle of First because until you do you cannot receive your vallaslin and be declared an adult. Your coming of age ceremony will be conflated with the formal end of your apprenticeship. This is the year. It has to be. You can practically taste the ascension.

 

But until then there is more training, more preparations. You must earn the privilege of being called the First even if it is only mere formality seeing as you are the only candidate around. So you learn magic, you recite the old ways, you practice the healing arts, and you prove yourself in all the ways that matter, but still Keeper does not declare you ready. Still, you do not receive your vallaslin.

 

Your clan suffocates you. Your people are afraid of losing you, your potential, what you represent, and so keep you close to camp because you are tangible proof that Clan Lavellan ever once existed as something more than a shadow of itself. You are the living, breathing repository of their hopes and dreams. More than just being the First, more than simply becoming a future leader, you are to serve as a reminder of a time in which magic flourished and the People were flush with health.

 

Because you are strong. You are easily the strongest mage here in the absence of all competition.

 

The Keeper doesn't count because she is so old, so frail. You may be her successor, but in her eyes you're meant to be something more. You are in actuality a symbol. It's writ so plain on her face—you are an artifact of glory, nothing more. You may as well not be a person at all. You feel so alone.

 

Living as a Dalish means to meander. There is no purpose. Your people are aimless. The inescapable truth is that there is no future among the Dalish. Yet it is only out of duty that you keep to your studies in order to fulfill your bleak role. It is only out of duty that you close your eyes to this grim truth. You've always been good at denial.

 

Especially when there is only wandering, only shivering. No farms. No food. No hearth. Only little snatches of fresh water when you can before the rivers are inevitably staked out by templars. Rumors of blood mages, maleficarum, savage cannibals, and the newly come elves always ensue; this is nothing new. It is only ever templars who seem to stumble upon your clan, after all. The only ones brave enough and willing to patrol the lost winding paths found among the Vimmark mountain range.

 

Especially Sundermount. Clan Lavellan stays to the north of it, far from Kirkwall, so as to keep a whole mountain's length between the city-state and the clan. You will not be sent to a Tower. You will die before you suffer capture. Luckily, it need not come to that. Stories of Sundermount's sheer infamy usually keep even the most audacious away. It's long been believed that revenants and ancient spirits, restless demons and vengeful ghosts, have long since trickled from the shadows of its peaks and into the surrounding forests below. More than any other place in the Free Marches, the forests at the base of the Vimmark range seem even denser while the wilds feel even wilder. Even slavers seem to stay away. Your clan has always taken advantage of that. Just to make doubly, sure, though every month the clan uproots and and moves.

 

And yet despite these precautions still the templars come, as if less by accident now and more by design. It happens so frequently, so predictably, throughout the seasons that it becomes clear somebody is actually hunting the clan. Clacking is the sound an aravel wheel makes in mid-panicked flight, a familiar noise.

 

It is a mistake to assume they'll just go away because they don't. It soon becomes clear they are searching for you. You are the one they hunt. They stalk the forest for you. Until your adolescence you have not truly understood the templar threat, but now you experience their ceaseless, rabid hunting for yourself. Some shem must have caught sight of you once. It only takes the one time. The disturbingly renewed interest in your clan can only be explained thus.

 

This must be how these templars know about you. That must be why they so obsessively track you down. Keeper suspects it is because you are still a fledging yet; the stronger your control becomes, the harder it will be for them to detect you. But isn't that why the clan keeps fleeing about the valleys of the Vimmark range? There is already so much ambient magic in these parts. How can one mage alone be powerful enough to stand out?

 

 _Oh, da'l_ _e_ _n, you are more powerful than you know_ , she says. _This is why you need to study hard_ _and learn the rituals of the First well. Master your power, so you can finish your training._

 

You doubt it.

 

 _This is your doing_ , your Keeper's words seem to whisper instead.

 

And so the curse of your magic harries the clan now as much as the templars. It is not such a blessing after all. And yet, still, the threat seems surreal. Can they be so monstrous indeed?  
  


You've never encountered a templar face-to-face before. Your parents are too good at scouting ahead in order to chart a safe path while your teacher keeps you too close for such a grievous mistake like that to ever occur. So eventually you start getting annoyed. You don't understand why anybody would expend so much hate and energy in chasing you. Shouldn't they just give up?

 

And yet every year of your adolescence thus goes as such: as the leaves turn from spring to summer, and then to autumn decay and winter frost, still the templars come looking for you. Pattern eventually transforms into a haggard desperation that drives the clan onwards and onwards without rest, without break. Tents set up in the night, once efficiently placed for weeks at a time, are now hastily broken down at the crack of dawn because the daylight means it would be harder to evade the templars.

 

With this past winter comes a near breaking point, a particularly trying one, in which clan no longer even bothers to set up camp. Everyone just sticks to the aravels. Numbers are few enough that this is actually a viable plan. There is only the clan, huddling tight in cramped corners, with everyone breathing the same stale air while exuding the musk of sweat and fear as the templars come ever near. If that sounds as unnerving as the Dread Wolf nipping at your heels, it is.

 

But it is spring now, summer soon.

 

Keeper keeps you close during this time with a clawing grip as she sends out scouts and hunters and warriors—everyone but you. Never you. Bow and knives in hand, even your parents tell you to listen and be good.

 

By now you are so sick of flight, of fleeing, of cowardice when you want to stand and fight! Your magic is already so strong. When will they trust you? And when will Keeper proclaim you to be ready?

 

Over and over again this happens again, this cycle, this despicable pattern, until you are so very sick of it and tired of running, never living, always having to stop looking over your shoulder even while you bathe in a river. You want to leave the forest, leave the Free Marches behind.

 

You want the clan to stop circling round and round these human cities, sneering at the idea of venturing too close, yet ironically never hesitating to claim any and all of their refuse and tossed out scraps, materials, and resources—as if you were all just good enough to be scavengers and thieves, vultures and rats! You are sick of being Dalish. You are sick of always being lectured. You are so sick of your studies. But most of all you are heartsick at never seeing your parents, the clan’s scouts, whom the Keeper keeps sending away when there is no point, no purpose, when the next destination will just be another Creators damned forest anyway.

 

And when your frustration boils over each time they leave?

 

 _Listen to the Keeper_ , your mother will tell you. _Stop being childish_ , she will say, marring each goodbye. _You aren't a child anymore._

 

Just as you predict, the cycle happens over and over again. Keeper advises you not to be angry during these times. That path is not wise, she'd say. And yet you are. You are so very angry. You are angry at them as well as her. Every adult is standing in your way.

 

You never wanted this position, but this is birthright and duty. Your only duty. But while each new day brings a fresh conviction that you cannot bear the weight of it any longer, you have no choice.No one else can be the First. Yet how much longer will that take? How can you be admonished for being a child when no one will give you your vallaslin?

 

As spring becomes summer, though, comes a season where things turn a little differently.

 

This is the summer in which your family will part ways forever—the last time you will get to see your mother’s face, the last time your father will get to hug you close. Usually at such partings, your mother will huff and turn away from your complaints while your father will do otherwise. Instead of treating you with that same wearied exasperation, the unique frustration from dealing with a willful daughter, he will instead close his eyes, hold you tight, and murmur for you to be good. He will murmur endlessly about how much he loves you.

 

You no longer remember his voice.

 

After one such trying occasion, your Keeper ends up approaching you to confirm that you are nearly ready to become the First. It is time to meditate upon your choice of vallaslin. You are in disbelief at first. The news manages to distract you successfully for a time. Actually, you find yourself distracted a lot because of it. Your coming of age ceremony even starts to be tentatively planned.

 

This is finally happening, and yet it doesn't seem real. In hindsight, nothing about this year will feel real.

 

The summer in which you are to finally take on the mantle of the First seems auspicious at first. Though your parents spend longer and longer trips away, they are not in vain. There are discoveries to be had, rich bounties to be teased out of crevices and hidden paths. As the hunters follow migration patterns, the needs of the hunt dictates that the clan edge closer and closer to Sundermount's northern base. Yet that makes Kirkwall only mere leagues away. Everyone a little nervous. Less so at the fact that you are apparently in a forest that is particularly cursed.

 

Every forest in the Free Marches is purportedly cursed, this one even more so. But this is where your clan finds shelter now because humans will always find some reason to stay away and never take advantage of resources were their ears to catch the barest wisp of rumor. After all, this area is reviled by shems due to tales of lost spirits trapped in the woods, in the trees, by blood mages performing dark rituals under the light of the waning yellow moons. Baseless rumors, but humans will believe anything.

 

That isolation is precisely why the clan has been drawn to this place. It's the only reason the hunters don't immediately abandon yet another fruitless chase and the only reason Clan Lavellan stays. Everyone is weary of running and hiding. Whether or not those blood mages exist, it is better to take advantage of shem fear, shem ignorance. It's true there's great power to be had in siphoning away the ambient power from the nearby Sundermount range; the shadowy arts of Tevinter would excel here and so would the primal powers of ancient elvhen magic.

 

Yet therein lies madness. Demons would be doubly so attracted to such foolishness. Your Keeper takes care to warn you away from such ideas.

 

 _Scribing vallaslin on your face_ , she states, _will be the only blood ritual performed here_.

 

But the oppressively close atmosphere of Sundermount only serves to depress many in the clan further. It's so overwhelming that it drives even some hunters to become paranoid enough to jump at shadows in the dark due to how frequently they must stray far from the clan's protective warding.

 

The only thing that could've made the situation worse would be sightings of more templars. Yet their presence seems missing, their hunt oddly eased. Perhaps this can finally be a reprieve, however brief. Though there haven't been much successes lately in the hunt, maybe that recovery time alone would make staying here work.

 

Still, there is a lingering pall of despair hanging in the air during the summer you turn fourteen. And yet that is precisely when the true glory of the Creators becomes revealed.

 

Andruil reveals her summoned stags. Here and now, she gifts the clan with whole herds of them— enough to comfortably feed everyone for two seasons with careful planning, hunting, preserving, and rationing so as to not deplete the area and strain this local population of fauna. But without ironbark to craft new weapons and bows, Andruil’s gift would have gone wasted. Additionally, travels have been hard as of late. There hasn’t been time to repair old equipment since the last miserable winter while dodging templars have eroded and worn down the aravels even further.

 

Yet more ironbark is miraculously found much to the joy of the smith, who praises June’s name. But the full trinity of domestic security would not be complete without Sylaise’s divinity: enough elfroot, embrium, and herbs to fully replenish the clan's stores.

 

With less stress on communal resources, things become relatively peaceful for once. The clan finally has time to flourish, perhaps grow. As the days turn longer and the sun sets later, there is also less darkness to be wary of and more natural light to do productive things.

 

There is even less conflict when everyone is now allowed to leave the tight confines of the aravels and stretch out their legs—both a literal and a metaphoric breath of fresh air. And with less conflict, comes more laughter. More hope. Camp is set up with an air of permanence for once, especially when it stays standing every consecutive morning afterward. The invigorating sight of such makes everyone eager to help with tasks and chores, anything create more stability.

 

For weeks the clan manages to hide without being tracked down by a single stubborn shem. In the summer that seems safe, even humans rapidly fade to become a distant, bad memory. How can such terrors exist amidst the overlapping trees of a blessed forest?

 

Survival seems almost a given now, an afterthought, when everyone can finally begin to banish memories of templars. So great is this communal sense of equilibrium, this sense of restoration, that you no longer have to walk among your own people feeling the crushing guilt of being alive. Everyone is too busy recovering, after all, to think on oh so distant storms—even to pay much attention to you. A miracle, indeed.

 

Since the thought of past or future crises do not yet so harshly intimate in the fresh light of a summer's dawn, everyone can breathe a little easier. And so Mythal the All-Mother, that great protector, is praised.

 

But what the gods give, the gods can take away.

 

And you do not yet realize that the Creators, so silent, pale in the face of true gods.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy. This is when the story tags start kicking in, folks. 
> 
> I always did think the cosmic horror elements of Dragon Age needed a little more cranking up. Let's dial it up to 11, shall we?


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lavellan thinks templars are the worst things in the world. She is wrong.

In the shadows of Vimmark lies a village outside of a forest. Back in the spring, the clan had to carefully bypass the area in order to cross safely into those woods—an ordeal at first due to how the aravels also had to navigate unexpected ruins. Human constructions are never kind to aravel wheels.

 

Because stretching along the length of the forest is a long broken remnant of Imperium highway road. Today this epitaph to human pride sits empty of grand ambitions, a ruined road of Tevinter make that turns to dust. Though impossibly long, it's more of a sad dirt-trodden path these days. You're not even sure if it's still being used because everything is being eaten away by uncontrollable plant growth, by the encroaching trees, as the wilds of the Free Marches reconquer all. The only traces of former Tevinter glory to be seen here is found in the last vestiges of crumbling stone, in the multiple pillars that still stand or the archways that loom. Yet some day soon they, too, will be erased. What the trees haven't claimed yet will be eventually consumed.

 

Perhaps the whole of the empire that had once picked clean the corpse of Arlathan will one day disappear. If only your people were so lucky.

 

For now much of the toppled fragments of the imperial highway have already sunken in the ground. Occasionally, stark glimpses of buried white stone can be seen poking up through the dirt, gleaming in the sun. They form jagged lines of sharp teeth that snake along the length of the road; it doesn't look exactly safe. Looking north, you can see that the highway continues onward to Tevinter until its many varied segments stretch far from sight. But when you look in the opposite direction, you can see how the road weaves in a southernly manner because it is at the whims of interruptive ancient trees. When it finally hits the base of Sundermount, the road begins to lazily wind and curl and slink up its sides. Eventually, this part of the highway disappears as well after it turns a corner, melds into a tunnel, and becomes one with the rock—only to reemerge as a visible mountain pass, the only one in sight. The southern half of the Free Marches beckons.

 

In its heyday, you suspect this would've been a ridiculously tricky road to traverse, much less today when it is in such disarray. And that's without taking into account the additional detours inside the passages of Sundermount itself, which are as inevitable as they are foolish. Yet humans will always wander where they want to conquer, so fumbling through a mountain full of the restless dead seems to be right in line with shem logic.

 

But witnessing how these ruins and unnatural structures clutter up the mountainside is even more dismaying than knowing that it is Kirkwall that waits at the end of the road. At the height of the Imperium, a slaver's port would've undoubtedly been too valuable to ignore, especially when such highways are famed for having once connected all the major cities on the continent together. All roads lead to Minrathous, even from faraway ports.

 

And so the ancient shems must have taken the otherwise insurmountable mountain as a challenge, leading to land routes being carved out of holy grounds. Such signs of human domination should disgust anyone. Desecrations such as these are the reason the Dalish have stayed away from the region for centuries, but your clan has always been a stubborn one. Still, it is unnerving.

 

The imperial highway project must've been one of excessive hubris indeed. Even today's shemlen historians crow about it. Man's will made manifest, after all, through the conquering of nature—the only cost being, of course, the blood of slaves. The entire network of roads must be rank with suffering. No wonder the Veil is thin here.

 

Some say the bustling activity and transport of ancient slaves can still be heard today in the gnashing, wailing, agitated moans of the rattling undead. They're not entirely wrong. You can see them right now: ambient wisps floating free as they glow in the light of the setting sun. They may be restless spirits, but these are harmless ones—not that humans can make that distinction. The wisps are drawn out of the woods at night because they are attracted to the ruins, which isn't surprising considering how Tevinter roads were once magically hewn. And as you watch the wisps gracefully converge along its length, you find yourself marveling at shem ignorance, at how often humans misunderstand the truth.

 

Something about the thought of restless elvhen spirits seems to scare shemlen more than the actual historical fact of their brutality, which you will never understand. Despite the highway's gruesome history, the village has been built conspicuously closer to the road than to the mountain itself. It is as if the shems think that spirits will be less likely to appear if they live closer to the recognizably human-built structure. This is silly considering how the whole area would be affected by tears in the Veil.

 

That's why you're so fascinated with this little shem village—it's so full of contradictions and nonsensical logic. Free Marchers are notoriously suspicious of both blood magic and elves, yet here's a village placed so close to a forest! The only thing separating these ancient trees from farmland is the grand skeleton of a highway road. And so what's to stop a terrible elf like you from spying? Because that's precisely what you're doing now.

 

For the past summer weeks in which Clan Lavellan has camped close to Sundermount, you've caught yourself daydreaming about this day multiple times. You know from past experience traveling around the Free Marches that this week is the first wheat harvest of the year—and with that comes festivals, bonfires, dances, and crackling lights cheerfully standing out in the darkness of the night.

 

And now that time of year has come around once more.

 

You've always yearned to witness such sights for yourself. You've burned with envy whenever you've had to look upon the warmth of shem lights, only to be forced to turn away. And yet here, finally, is the opportunity to experience such an event for yourself—albeit from a distance. So in a fit of pique, you've come to watch the humans dance. You have snuck away from the clan. The festival is supposed to go from sundown to sunrise, you know. But while you don't quite have the nerve to stay out that long, surely you can stay just long enough for the bonfires to burn? Already the shadows stretch and grow as the sun dips lower in the sky.

 

While crouched in the ruins of the Tevinter empire, you hide behind its pillars as you spy on the villagers. All the village is awash in the red and orange warm hues of the bowing sun. You watch as the farmers finish setting up torches and bonfires in and out of their village square. Only a wheat field stands in between you and the starting festivities. You are eager, too eager, for the festival to start, but they're not quite ready yet. In an effort to distract yourself from becoming overly impatient, though, you've been examining your Tevinter surroundings for what feels like hours. But now that the sun has fully set, it is now time to start paying attention again.

 

If this is taboo, which it is, then you don't care. It's just one night. That's all, you tell yourself. Can't you just seize this one night for yourself? Because as always your studies are tedious, your Keeper is busy, you have no friends, and your parents are never ever around. So who's going to stop you? Things have finally settled down for the clan, but who knows when everyone will have to flee again because of you. This may very well be the last and only opportunity you will ever get to fulfill a wish you've always had—you can feel it. You're utterly convinced of it. And you are sick of not getting what you want, so in the end you couldn't resist. Slipping away spontaneously at the time felt like a dangerous decision, yet it's one you can hardly regret now.

 

Because despite your nervousness there still beats an excited flutter in your chest, a yearning in you that has been ever blooming and growing until it is all encompassing.

 

The sun fully sets and night arrives. A cheer rises up from the collective crowd of shemlen, as the bonfires are lit and their flames soar into the sky. More shems spill out of their dwellings, dragging out platters of food and casks of drink. All the while there are others carrying out freshly slaughtered animals and game in preparation for spits and roasts. Even from a distance, you can find pleasure in feasting your eyes upon such a spectacle. Their enthusiasm proves infectious when it heightens your own because you feel drunk off of the excitement of it all.

 

At first you take care to not be seen by staying put. There's little chance anybody can catch you so long as you stay hidden among the broken crevices of the highway. But you are still so far away from the village lights, and they beckon, and you yearn. This field of wheat impossibly seems to start stretching wider and wider the longer it stands in your way.

 

And as the sky grows darker, it also gets harder to see any village activity until eventually you can only guess at the festivities based on sound alone. You are stuck in shadows away from the light. The frustration and unfairness of that inherent truth stings until you feel stupid when you suddenly realize that you've been treating the shems overly with caution—as if they could see as well in the dark as you!

 

You wait until everything plunges into darkness, except for the roaring bonfires that beckon, before you make your move. As you carefully make your way through the ruined fragments of Tevinter road, you grow bold enough to then slip right away into the nearby field of wheat at the first chance you get. Excitement beats in your chest. You are daring and adventurous. You are elvhen! You can see very well in the dark, so all of this is child's play. You remain hidden and undetected the whole time.

 

Eagerness dogs your every step, pushes your heels, pressuring you to move faster, but you are crouched low and savoring the slow anticipation of moving through the wheat field. You fancy yourself a hunter with the village as your prey. Though the wheat has been harvested already, you are still small enough to successfully hide among its stalks by staying low to the ground. It's like a game. Creeping ever close, you eventually in the middle of the field once you can see the village square. You can see all the festivities now quite clearly, and this is when your breath hitches in surprise.

 

There is a group of giggling girls that dance and play and demand every ounce of your attention. From the ruins you couldn't see them, but now their activity is so evident and clear. Never have you ever seen anyone behave like this before. Or chatter like so. Or laugh aloud raucously, noisily, gloriously. So enamored are you that your eyes end up tracking these girls for the next minute, the next hour, the rest of the night until time streams together. You don't know how long you have been hungrily watching village from the field, and yet the longer you watch, the more fascinated you become.

 

This is a theater of dance.

 

These girls are about your age and as they dance the night away, you are further struck dumb by their mesmerizing free-floating hair. Long tresses hang past their shoulders while the back of your head curls with the rising humidity. Already you can feel more sweat form at the nape of your neck. Only the practical shortness of your locks provide relief, but at the cost of having your cut bangs be jagged and messy—a dagger's specialty. It's only now that you realize it's ugly, but never has it occurred to you to cut your hair any other way.

 

And how are their clothes so neat and mended? Without the telltale signs of hasty stitches on top of repaired holes? Their dresses rustle loosely and freely from their bodies, whereas the edges of your own are always wrestling with and snagging upon the sharp ends of wild branches. How do these shem girls make even the act of sweating from dancing look delightful? Even the thought of trying to do the same right now just makes your leather-clad body feel even more suffocatingly sticky.

 

You absentmindedly swipe at your forehead, wiping away a trailing bead of sweat. The gear is practical for sure, but during travel? The armor never fails to cling like second skin, especially at the slightest hint of exertion, to the point it seems to always be slick and tacky with the feel of sweat. It's disgusting.

 

Nothing at all like these shem clothes. Their skirts spin so freely, as if they were light and airy, whereas the obligatory robes you must wear during your studies have always felt heavier than cloth need to be. They may be the mantle of the First, but they are burdensome due to how wretchedly they hang in the turgid summer airs. You can't even imagine the personal suffering of trying to dance in them either.

 

Yet would you dare to remark as such aloud? Or hint to anyone that such clothes make you feel clothed in anything but honor and dignity? Living in the forest is hard enough as it is without being forced to wear robes that just serve to make you even more sweaty and filthy—never mind how paradoxically impractical it is to wear such garb in the middle of stuffy forests or in the midst of horrible weather. Yet it is the Dalish who dictate it so. It is the clans who insist on such a tradition for their mages. Why?

 

All this time you thought only shemlen to be so illogical and insane. But it is only now, after watching these shemlen girls dance while in the flush of rebellious youth, that you feel like the insane one.

 

This startling realization, the utter unfairness of it all, makes you want to rail at the tyranny of culture, but you can't. Because even now you still wouldn't speak such criticisms aloud, would you? Especially not in front of your Keeper. You'd die of shame. She wouldn't suffer such complaints anyway and neither would your peers. Not when you alone among them have the luxury of sitting inside a tent, poring over books, for days on end.

 

And it is then and only then in one complete moment of madness does it happen—a sudden impulse, a whim, a deliciously traitorous thought.

 

What if you were inside that tent right now while surrounded by your peers as you strip off your robes and toss them away, only to end up putting on a girlish shem dress instead?

 

For a moment you stop breathing.

 

It's appalling. It's shocking. It's fiendishly appealing.

 

Watching the girls feels like a waking dream. With every whirl of a dance, every flirtation, every slight movement of their delicate birdlike hands, you are addicted. You need to see more. This is a theater of shem ritual, love, and dance that you continue to be fascinated by because it is only now that you finally realize why.

 

Suffering doesn't flag their every step. Shadows don't dwell in their eyes. These are not the downtrodden, beaten down People of the Dales. These girls don't live like rats. They are not Dalish. They don't need to live moment to moment, day by day. They need not be obsessively concerned with survival with every active and conscious thought or even torture themselves with questions like when will the next meal come and where will fresh water be found?

 

Instead, these silly girls can afford to leave behind so many trails of broken hearts, flustered boys and men, but in an aravel everyone is packed so tight. In a Dalish camp there can be no flirtations, no privacy, no innocent blush of first love without everyone else finding out. You’ve caught others sneaking away successfully, though, no doubt to revel in privacy just as you have now. But whereas they've been fooling around and learning to kiss, learning to glow, you’ve come out here to watch humans dance. You start to feel a little pathetic at that.

 

You’ve never been held. Who'd sneak off with you? Who is there to embrace you in some private copse of trees? Your peers are not really your peers, not really, because besides your Keeper you are alone. You will always be alone. A bonding will happen someday, you know, but that's a given. You are a mage. That makes you precious breeding stock, so a bonding is inevitable, but it's not like duty or inevitability attracts boys. There is propriety at stake.

 

And even if there is boy who would want to spirit you away, you wouldn't know what to do with one anyway.

 

The girls stop dancing and leave your line of sight.

 

The once soft blooming yearning in you now twists and tightens and turns bittersweet.

 

This is asinine. You shouldn't have come. You shouldn't even be here. As you struggle to dampen the sudden hurt in your heart, the taboo and excitement of it all now turns crushing with the weight of your own shame. Foolishly, though, you're still reluctant to pull away. Half-heartedly, you try to convince yourself to head back to the highway, to go back to camp, to go curl in your bedroll, yet you hesitate. You keep lingering, perhaps daring the world to just give you one more excuse to stay.

 

And that's when it happens. In an instant your gaze catches a new searing sight—a human couple, laughing, as they flounce away. Not only do they leave the festival together, they leave the village altogether.

 

Forget the girls. Now you track this couple with your eyes. As they carelessly head your way, you crouch even lower to the ground while still being hidden in the wheat field. When you move to a more advantageous, you end up straying dangerously close to the outlying buildings on the village boundaries. But this sudden sense of danger, coupled with a strange sort of anticipation, excites. The danger further makes you heady with recklessness, as you intuit you are about to witness an intimacy so rarely found in the open of a Dalish clan. You ought to feel a thief, you ought to be ashamed, but you push the feeling down with surprisingly little guilt as your breath catches in your throat. Your keen eyes feast upon the sight of the boy's face, as he moves away from bonfires and into starlight.

 

It's striking. The difference is startling. It makes so visibly clear that this is a boy without a single streak of vallaslin. In your culture, he wouldn't even be a man. Yet in lieu of smooth and supple elvhen skin, there's a tantalizing sort of swarthiness instead—a farmer's rural tan, some stubble, a broad jaw, and jutting sensual lips. And all the while the sight of his skin continues to intoxicate: little beads and pearls of sweat as they rapidly transform from a gleaming firelit bronze into the pale cool hues of midnight blue.

 

He hasn't the look of a hardened Dalish warrior. He is irrevocably human, he is undeniably forbidden, but you swallow and can't look away.

 

And as the boy reaches out to tuck his smiling companion’s hair behind her ear, she giggles. He take her hand, deposits a white ribbon in her grasp, and her gasp is audible and clear. As she delightfully strokes its length, winds it between her fingertips, moonlight glows off of its texture. Even from a distance, you can tell it is a delicate wisp of silk, ethereal and aglow with the flush of first love, first kiss. They kiss.

 

No one has ever given you such a gift.

 

The boy briefly breaks the kiss and pulls back, only to then bring ribbon-clad fingers to his lips. How long do they stare into each other's eyes? A distracting sight. He seems so enamored with her, and so you are stunned at how gentle he seems, how preciously he treats the girl.

 

How long do you crouch in the field, watching them? A clapping applause breaks out in the night, as the villagers celebrate the end of a hard harvest, but the sound may as well be distantly far for all the notice the lovers give. And as they embrace again under the weight of the full moon, increasingly are you filled with a hollow sort of yearning that makes you ache, makes you sick.

 

You've begun to dream of impossible things, think of impossible scenarios. You've become distracted. The dance, this ribbon, the innocence of two loves—none of this should have mattered in the first place because you are not in the forest anymore. In the camouflage of dense leaves and bark, it is easy enough to hide away from shems. You do it in your sleep. But here in a wheat field? On the outskirts of a shem village in the stark light of the moon? You've let yourself be drawn away. You've let yourself become careless.

 

You are just a fool.

 

A templar catches you. He looks like a regular shem when he finds you. You don’t know how he senses you. He isn’t wearing armor. He isn’t armed. You don’t know his true nature until it is too late. He’s even tipsy with drink when he first stumbles out of the village and comes upon the two embarrassed lovers. The mood is ruined. The scene is in tatters. Your greedy eyes had wanted more, to see the next continuation. You’re distracted. You think he is just a normal man, perhaps a farmer, another festival drunkard, which lets your guard down, which is a mistake, because one moment he is still laughing at the two of them when suddenly in the next his body stiffens, goes taut, goes fierce.

 

His stunned face contorts with the rage of discovery, of terror and revelation, as he whips into motion and shoves the other shems to safety, shouting about abominations. In their stumbling panic, the boy cries out while the girl drops her ribbon. They flee as it crumples to the ground, stained.

 

The templar snarls and searches the field where he sees you, finds you, hates you. In your panic, you're already mid-rise out of your crouch, but then are stopped short by his roving gaze. You are stricken. The shock of it all, this sudden turn, freezes you until you can do nothing else but gape in horror at his eyes, his all-seeing eyes—no, his aura. This sticky-sweet menacing aura, the saccharine call of rising lyrium, this power, and the additional bitter twang of blood you can taste on the back of your tongue when out of reflex you suddenly bite down hard—you recognize it, this taste of despair. How can you not? How could you have let your guard down? But there's no time to berate yourself when this abrupt sickly molasses pressure throws you off your feet—making you reel, making you sick. It sears your senses as you choke and gasp for air, for even a puff of breath that isn’t there, as the oxygen rapidly leaves your lungs, depletes, goes scarce.

 

You’ve heard the stories. You’ve heard the tales. You’ve been lectured at over and over, but Keeper’s words had met deaf ears.

 

Because how could you have known, how could you have truly comprehended, when your parents had worked so hard just to keep the clan one step ahead of the templars?

 

You've never been Silenced before. You’ve never been so full of fear.

 

You are insensate with numbness, pain, and a dazed sort of confusion as you writhe in terror, as your back seizes with convulsions, as your mind recoils with existential horror every time you try and reach for the Fade only for the magic to not be there, never there. You can’t stop reeling from the sluggish syrup response of your mana—so dampened it may as well have never existed at all. But still you can’t stop trying until eventually you can’t move at all, can’t think. You think you can hear screaming only to realize it is coming out of you.

 

The templar steps closer, arms raised, chin high, with his voice hoarse and throaty with triumph as he continues to chant at you.

 

Time stretches, softens and slows, like the thick ropes of honey your father once shares as he gently nurses you back to health that time when you are young, bedridden, and convinced of your own death. The memory of your father can be distilled into ribbons in golden form, awash with love and warmth, but those ribbons are torn apart now. So when you try and remember what it was like swallowing whole that sweet medicinal honey, those silken strands of comfort, you can't. You can't open your mouth to do anything but scream, even when you're desperate to accept the offering, when you want to remember a time without pain, without agony. You can’t due to the ceaseless, violent contractions of your body. The memory of your father is left in tattered shreds—the worst violation of all.

 

The screaming won’t stop. It may as well be white noise at this point. Static, an unchanging chant. That makes sense as the templar draws near. You can tell his mouth is moving yet can hear nothing. You are nothing. You have become small, made smaller still by his overwhelming silence.

 

Still, there is a ringing in your ears. It sounds like the keening whine of death, abruptly bringing to mind the first time you saw a creature die. You were so young.

 

Here is the scene: your mother, your six-year-old self, and the fish you watch die by the riverside. As you witness the fading light in its black trout eyes, you remember a stricken sort of horror rising up to fill every fiber of your being. You remember its row of tiny teeth, the way its mouth flaps open and shut, open and shut—a movement that both sickens and mesmerizes all at once. It seems so mechanical. So unfeeling. But as the fish's body quivers to a halt, as its wriggling form finally settles, you are trapped still by its gleaming eyes.

 

One minute you are a giggling child, and it's alive. Then in the next, in one fierce instant, your mother catches this fish and spears it to the ground. But in that second when the fish is first pulled from the water, there is a surreal moment in which it does not struggle. Instead, it goes still as though it functions under the eerie artificial calm of an animal that does not believe in its own death.

 

That disbelief does not last.

 

You feel like throwing up because suddenly you can see yourself in the fish's place, as if its death were your very own. It is all too easy to imagine a sudden wretched pain, the shock of it, as well as the mindless terror of being pierced and penetrated as your body flops about on the tip of a spear. And still the fish keeps writhing on. You watch as it finally, mercifully, bitterly expires.

 

Until this moment, all you know of survival is how to fill a waterskin and how to separate poisonous herbs from the useful ones. This is why your mother has brought you out here to the river bank. _You’re old enough now_ , she declares. But you never wanted this.

 

Later, your mother will put a knife in your hands and teach you how to properly gut a fish, belly to tail. She will ignore the way your body trembles, trembles like the fish, until it is with impatience that she corrects your shaking grip. She will show you how to clean and scrape off its scales. And, finally, she will scold you for dropping the knife when your hands end up too slippery slick from handling these luminescent scales.

 

In the stark light of day, those rotting slivers of fish will shiver and wink at you.

 

On your deathbed, in the face of the templar, the sudden remembrance of this fish seizes you in a squeezing grip. You haven't thought about that riverbank in years.

 

But death is the sticky feel of blood flecks that dry too slow on your fingertips. It is the oozy, slimy sensation of little fish scales that cling no matter how hard you try to rub them off. Though you witnessed the fish physically die, something inside of it still feels alive. Even as you hold its corpse in your hands, as you prepare to gut it from belly to tail, some part of you still refuses to believe it is dead. And when the skin and muscles of its belly are flayed, split open, and peeled back apart, you can tell there is something still lurking within its corpse-still eyes.

 

You suddenly realize why you had tried so hard to suppress this memory, what had so terrified you when you were a child.

 

Because when you stare into those eyes, you can see your own face reflected back at you—tiny, trapped, and small.

 

It's a study in contrast. It's a lesson in terror. All your life darkness has evoked a sense of dread in you; it is only now, with a singular sort of stunning clarity, that you finally understand why.

 

The second you see the light in its eyes die is also the exact second your mana reaches out, touches the Fade, touches the fish, and connects you to both simultaneously as it dies. You are only six. Not only does your magic manifest for the first time, but you become the fish that dies. This is when you feel the Fade. This is the precise moment you become a mage.

 

But as you feel the fish's essence wither and slip away into the unknown, into the unfathomable, you make yet another terrible mistake.

 

When you look into the abyss, it is the abyss that stares back out.

 

Deep inside that black dead gaze, something begins to stir as it turns its gaze onto you. You end up screaming as loudly then as you do now.

 

Because it is pitiless.

 

The stars now outline the templar’s head as he looms over you. Dimly, you hear the panicked, screaming shouts aroused from the village square. How soon until the shems organize enough to seethe out as an angry singular horde? Worse than darkspawn, more foul than the Blight—at least the latter is merely a force of nature.

 

Still gasping for breath, you feel your hand sluggishly move on its own like a separate entity detached from the rest of your body. You feel it reaching at your hip for something, as the templar pulls out a hidden knife and raises it high.

 

Belly to tail.

 

Sternum to navel.

 

He's going to gut you like a fish.

 

Then your mother’s fierce image sings in your mind. _Get up_ , she says. _Get up and fight!_

 

A spike of fury pierces your numbness. That fuzzy detachment abruptly rips apart, torn and shred, while reality screams back into existence under the templar’s pitiless gaze. All the world is drowning as lyrium screeches in your ear. You want to curl up and die. _But your mother just told you to get up_.

 

Your hand gropes the handle of your knife, the very object your mother has always insisted to keep on you at all times. As you grip it tight, preparing to wield it in a wild slash to ward your assaulter off, your muscles flex then tighten. In the sudden certainty of death with inaction, your hands stops shaking. You stop screaming. Instead, you roar.

 

You thrust up your blade, startling him, disrupting his grip. But he roars back as he regains his fury, knocking you away when you aim for his soft belly, that unprotected gut. He should have worn armor. Templars are always cursed with armor. But without it now, he is quicker, more nimble.

 

With a panicked flail, you strike again, only for him to jerk back instinctively. He lifts his blade, tries a feint, and then a stab, but he is clumsy. He has been drinking. His hand lashes out. Once again your blade cuts his own thrust short. You will not be easy prey.

 

Something desperate, something wild, begins to grow in his eyes. He is in a battle for his life, but then so are you. Before, when you were stricken on the ground, he seemed so powerful, so in control. But now you are both just trying to survive.

 

Everything else fades into a distant din, as your focus sharpens on nothing but him. Metal screeches when you deflect his next slash. You try again and the two blades hiss and shriek apart from each other with metallic contact made. You try. You try and try and try again, but you are so very tired.

 

Though the acrid lyrium stink he carries recedes back slightly, your mana still won't come. With his need to fully concentrate against your wild attacks, he is rapidly losing his grasp on his templar powers. But until then it is all you can do just to barely hold him back. You are weakening. Your will weakens without the Fade to bolster you. And so he will kill you. He will kill you, he will find the others, and he will do it by bringing more templars. He will drag Keeper from her bed in order to slaughter her in front of everyone, and then spit on her corpse and let her rot without burial, without rites, without the rituals needed to pacify her soul and let it pass peacefully into the Beyond. She will be lost instead to the Void, and it will be all your fault.

 

You have wrought this. You will have brought this upon your clan. Things have been so hopeful, the future had seemed so bright, but it was a lie. And when this templar has finished with her corpse and has slain everybody else, he will wait. He will stand there, waiting for your parents to come back to burning tents and broken aravels, where the other templars will immediately subdue them and drag them forth just so he can murder them as well—all the while laughing. Laughing.

 

The slack-jawed emptiness of your father's face. Your mother's vacant gaze. You can see their bodies fall. The templar will kill him first, and then her next. And after she hits the ground, lips soundlessly moving, gasping, she will turn her head with the last vestiges of her strength just to see what's left of her family once more. She will not see you because you will be already dread.

 

 _Mamae_ , you want to weep. _Mamae, don’t leave me_.

 

But all you can see now is the back of her head. And though you cannot see her face, it does not matter. You can already sense it—the last glimmer of her essence as it finally dies. It is all too easy to imagine. You mourn her death. You are already mourning your own.

 

In a sudden deft motion with his blade, the templar finally manages to disarm you, wrestles you to the ground.

 

You try to break free, but it's hard. Your legs kick, your arms flail, and in the scuffle he loses his weapon. You shout and reach for it yourself, but then it's with a snarl that he grips your hair and pulls, wrenching it back only to slam down your head. Blood streaks free. You become dizzy. Your vision blurs. Your temple throbs with every frantic heartbeat as the back of your head bleeds. Perception of the world is knocked loose and ajar, as your head is slammed against a stone again and again, and you are so very tired. Your eyes flutter shut.

 

You can see your family still, the image of their corpses trapped under your eyelids. They're waiting for you.

 

You blink and he's suddenly on top of you. As your struggles weaken further, as you flail less and pant more, it is easy for the templar to drag you close. It is easy for him to lift one leg, then the other, to straddle you freely. He seizes your wrists, holds them tight, and it hurts. Capillaries break and your delicate skin bruises in your efforts to get away, but every time you try to fight he releases his grip just long enough to hit you again. The next time he tries to strike your face, though, you are ready.

 

You bare your teeth, and then snatch his merciless fist with a newly freed arm, lunging for whatever part of him you can grasp until you can savagely bite down deep. He seeks only your submission and death, so he will bleed for that, and he does. He bleeds. But your vicious satisfaction is cut short when he tears himself from your teeth, curses, then starts choking you. And choking you. And he doesn't stop, he will not stop, and that's when despair wells up in your heart as you can't breathe, _you can't breathe_.

 

Then everything stops.

 

Hands release your throat. You take your first unimpeded gasp of air, but you can barely swallow. Black spots dart across your vision, but dazed and dimmed as it is you can still perceive the glorious stars. They are the only pinpricks of light in the dark when the clouds drift across the sky, across the moon.

 

You struggle to sit up, squirm away from the male weight, when a sudden arterial spray of blood splatters across your face. For one endless moment you think it yours—that you are the one to have died.

 

Moonlight breaks free and sets the scene aglow. Your mother has slit the templar's throat. Her expression contorts with a snarl, with grief, as she sees you. One hand is pulling back his head, baring his throat. Her other hand is clutching the dagger already dripping from its bloody deed.

 

The templar, you note, is trying to scream. But as his lips keep trying to form wordless cries, they keep flapping open and shut. Open and shut. His vocal cords have been cut. His eyes are bulging and wild, begging to meet yours, but you shun them and glance away. You try not to be drawn to them, so instead you are fascinated with his newly formed second mouth—blood gushes from his throat. It dribbles down past the neck of his shirt, past his collarbone, down toward his sternum and chest.

 

The trails they leave gleam black in the night.

 

Beyond relief, beyond blind searing relief, some small quiet thing you’ve never noticed before speaks up, some small terror you've been suppressing in the back of your mind. That part of you starts out as a whimper, a murmur, until it picks up into a keening cry, sounding even more just a little bit louder, a little bit more deafening, more demanding, until your perception of such is so warped you can hear nothing else.

 

As your magic trickles back into your being faster and faster, your mana is restored to you in the rush of a tide, but still you notice that eerie roaring growing louder. You can sense the Fade now as the connection snaps back into place. The barrier and threshold of Silence that had kept your soul from its grasp now fractures, and then shatters completely.

 

Almost against your will your gaze drifts back to the templar's gaze. Some unholy light within is burning to consume and swallow you whole. It gulps for you.

 

Something is watching you. Something has always been watching you. You've never told anyone. You've tried dismissing it. Over and over, you've refused to see it. Never have you wanted to give any more validity to Keeper's claims that obviously it is the duty of the First to learn to avoid the Dread Wolf's gaze, but. But. It's watching you now. That same entity.

 

The stilted paranoid instinct in you has always attributed this feeling to Fen'Harel if for nothing else than the reassurance of the known, in the emboldened power from being able to name a thing. But now you know how wrong you were. Something terrible is behind that templar's face. Some misshapen thing. And it is not Fen'Harel.

 

It has watched you. It is quivering for you. You've kept it waiting for _so_ long. It is so beside itself, it is gasping for you.

 

All throughout your life, ever since that little fish, some small tiny part of you has always been shrieking. That part of you is screaming now because you finally know the truth. Finally, you can _see_.

 

In the Fade is an ever hungry mouth panting and drooling for you, insatiable for you. Embedded in this nightmarish puckered flesh are a hundred black little blinking eyes, their eyelids twisting and folding in on themselves. They like to wink. They like to greet you. _I see you_ , says the mouth to the mage, and it is a convulsing slit of existence that flaps open and shut under its own delight.

 

You see both concrete reality and this glimpse of the Fade together at once, with the latter a hazy overlaid dream, a fleshy construct that does not yet seem real or whole. These lips are not enough to paint a complete picture. You think you can catch an impression of spindly limbs, bursting pustule growths, but at that thought your mind shies away, with each formless thread of perception trying to solidify instead sent scurrying away like a rat that wants to hide.

 

Some last vestige of self-preservation forcing you to look away lest your stare too long, too deep, but it is too late. These actions are in vain. They are all in vain.

 

You thought yourself blind and deaf without mana, but if only it were so. You were so naive. Without your magic, you were safe, but now? With it rapidly pouring back into you now, you want to die.

 

You can be forgiven at this moment for breaking. For you are broken. You are nothing at all. You are a little songbird collapsing under the weight of its own insignificance. You want to sing a song of praise as much as you are compelled to keep screaming because it is so grotesque a thing that vies for your affections, your attentions, your pleasure. As if to reward you, to encourage you, it wriggles like a little worm each time you feed it so. It yearns to pay back your gaze readily tenfold. Thus with every instance in which you give in, submit, and succumb to this creature, it becomes filled with nothing less than complete and total ardor—a heightened ecstasy that only grows with every lick it gives your cheek, getting more and more excited the more you whine, the more you writhe.

 

As its large fetid tongue finishes wiping clean your face of tears and shem blood, you beg it to stop, you beg it to stop, until it starts caressing your own tongue, and then turns the rest of its attentions onto you. It is crooning. You are weeping. Yet still it just keeps going, thrusting into you all the while until you are moaning.

 

Your mother is shouting at you now, shouting that there are other shems coming. She fights for your attention. But what is she compared to a god?

 

So overcome are you, this might as well not be reality at all. You might as well be dreaming. The words that spill forth from her lips barely register on this plane for this god is a jealous god. So wide and broad is its floating carcass, it need only open its mouth a little more, extend the turgid length of tongue and flesh just a bit further, in order to swallow you whole.

 

Even now it encompass your whole field of vision. And that's what you want. You are salivating for Void-forsaken mercy, but you do not know yet whether you are beseeching for a new beginning, an extension on life, or for merciful finality.

 

It chooses for you.

 

This is the sound of your identity cracking. This is the sound of glass shattering, gears halting, metal cranking, and wood splintering as wheels grind to a stop. It is the spokes and beams of the aravel that finally snap, sagging as it was too much under the weight of its own horror. This is the point in which the finite scope of your comprehension breaks. _Welcome home_.

 

Your mother is looking at you. Your mother is staring at you as if she's never seen you before. She seems to mistake your terror for something else, but she is wrong. You are in awe. How can she not see? How can she not _see_?

 

Forgive her. She is so mortal. She does not know.

 

As her countenance twists, as she readjusts her grip, as she wrenches back the templar's head just a little harsher, a little crueler, she raises her dagger high. It is action born of desperation. He is crying, but when the blade slices through the air again he does not again survive.

 

The templar dies. And you feel nothing.

 

He falls like so much useless chaff, reaped from all semblance of mercy, left to the soil to rot for all that body is good for now. But the templar falls forward on top of you instead. A mistake. He is heavy and you are trapped, pinned. Your mother makes a noise, her lithe form struggling to wrestle him off you, but you hardly notice.

 

Your cheek to his cheek. His slick neck flush against yours. Even now his corpse weeps. There is a gushing from his slit throat. There is dripping from his eyeballs. You wonder what that tastes like. You want to crawl inside.

 

You don't think Keeper would approve.

 

As your mother finally drags the body off of yourself, you can't help but try and catch another glimpse of this new god and its corpse-still eyes, of its visage, its face.

 

Its face.

 

It is a gaping black maw lined with sharp teeth, pointed and gleaming little hooks of memory. Those lips curl like they've been smiling at you all along. Each glimmer of a decayed pitted tooth winks back at you in a mockery of the stars. Each radiant wink gives off a viridian light that is so warm, so warm, it glows. You do not flinch in darkness now. It is your friend.

 

Panic seems so far away now, as every fabric of your being is seized upon by this glorious creature, leaving you helpless to no less than to behold and tremble before its form. You are awe-struck. You are in agony. It is eternity, the eternal. You've seen it once before. You've seen that exact set of teeth in the shape of a hapless fish. Your mother had been so fierce then, but now she is afraid. You were afraid once like her, but you no longer have to feel so alone. You will never be left lonely ever again.

 

For it is beauty. It is grace.

 

It's the abyss.

 

It grins.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I kinda like cosmic horror. Can you tell?
> 
> Thank you for reading! If you like where this is going, please drop a kudos or a comment so that I know I'm on the right track. Posting this chapter makes me nervous.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When templars can't follow you into the Fade, but other things can.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please be advised that this is when the Rape/Non-Con, Underage, and Violence tags really kick in. I'm sorry, Lavellan. I am so, so sorry.
> 
> Credit for elvhen language goes to FenxShiral at Project Elvhen.
> 
> This is such a messy chapter, such a hot mess, but I needed to get it out there. All nearly 10k words of it. From here on our story will not be the same.

You are on an aravel and your breath hitches in your throat—alone in a wagon? It is dark and empty inside. But where have your people gone? Are they dead? Are you truly alone? Unfamiliar circumstances make you even more anxious. You start to hyperventilate, become dizzy.

 

You are disoriented. You are clearly moving, with the wagon lurching to and fro in a familiar beat. But this eerie silence is what gets to you. Why? Why is this so? And where do you go? What you don't know is why. You don't know where you go.

 

Your whimpers have awoken a hitherto unseen companion. He emerges and slinks from the shadows. Your breath hitches at this sudden threat, but watcher rushes to your side, sits you upright, and presses the rim of a bowl close to your lips, but you are insensate. You wail, limbs knocking away the bowl, smacking him in the face, but the man only shushes you and holds you close. That is when your father fully materializes in form. It is a welcome sight. Though he cries along with you, his lips don't move. He is blank-faced. You think his noise to be faint, vague, as if muddled from a great distance, reverberating waves. And then a woman says,

 

_Da'lan...da'lan...!_

 

Flashes of memory: a corpse, a fire, a village on fire, your mother dragging you away. A forest looming, beckoning. A forest full of angry shems and shouts at your heels.

 

You weep. You don't know for how long or what for, for the Fade is surely already snatching away at your dream. You can't bare it otherwise for terror is piecemeal. It forms a tattered picture, an impression in the sand. Let it be washed away by the Waking Sea. But you know now that you are safe because your father is here to stay.

 

As if in agreement, the aravel wheels give another mighty lurch and your head almost bangs into the ceiling. All wits have fled. You wince and clutch your head, feeling at the wrapped linen edges of a bandage while your father looks grimly on. You can barely comprehend what he's telling you. As it is, you already feel like you've been knocked about senseless.

 

He tells you you've been attacked. That you've lost a lot of blood. You've been wounded very badly. Do you remember? Did that templar do this to you?

 

But you shy away from the memories, so your father abstains. He only takes your hand.

 

Where is mamae?

 

But he only looks at you with beetle black eyes and that's when you know. She is out hunting templars.

 

She is out hunting them because of you.

 

She's going to die because of you.

 

His words reverberating in your ears, you are not prepared for when he suddenly lunges at you next.

 

Fingers at your throat! Esophagus gagged, throat clenched, and a hiss in your ear— _So is this your fear?_

 

There's something being wrapped around your neck, some rope, pulling tighter and tighter until you choke. Swarthy hands, once beloved, now wrench with merciless glee. Quickly, his skin peels back and shudders until it is wrapped in shining gauntlet armor. He is transformed. He is of the Templar Order. And still he pulls.

 

_Is this what you fear?_

 

But that's not quite right, is it? In your rapidly blurred vision at the edge of peripheral sight, you see ephemeral glossy strands of iridescent ribbon white. The ribbon that doesn't belong here. You've never owned anything so fine, so glossy, so shemlen. Though a tear is squeezed from the corner of your eye, as it rolls down your cheek your horror feels unreal.

 

The moment you realize this you blink and you are alone again. Your father disappears like he was never really there. Light flickers and attracts your attention. Peeking outside between slats in the wood, you see it is so much brighter now. The world is screaming white.

 

All the aravels are burning tonight. The one you are in right now bursts into flame. You rear back. Everything is lit so bright. It's all on fire, yet doesn't burn, and that's when you know.

 

The camp is being attacked. This is a purge.

 

Here are are your screaming dead. The walls and roof shake with the sound of their shouts, pleas, yelps. Their echoing cries are met with savage chants, a swing of the sword.

 

You stare at the door. It's only mere steps away, but it may as well be impossibly far for all the obstacles that stand in your way. Each time you look at a new different corner, a bit of debris falls into place while new wooden beams shoot out and splinter from the ceiling. It's a little unnerving. But none skewer you.

 

The walls are pulsating. The interior encloses in on you like a lover or a womb. The fragile structure of the wagon is breaking, crumpling inward like so much collapsed fruit, with you as its indomitable seed. Because you are not dead. As the walls continue to quiver, pulse, and close in on you with the many chambered squeeze of a rapid heartbeat, how are you not dead?

 

You know you should go outside and help, as you are apparently impervious to harm somehow, but there is only screaming chaos out there. It may be all relative, but at least it's calmer in here. You find it hard to find your resolve because you keep hesitating. What is really out there, after all? It could be trap. You don't want that. Let's just stay inside. There's a din out there made from an amalgamation of suffering and fear. That's not something you want to involve yourself in. And although hearing it doesn't seem so surreal as to be removed from all possibility of reality, it still doesn't feel real. Your own fear is removed from your person somehow and made distant, perfunctory, like this is all a stage. This all seems so theatrical somehow. You resolve to remain unimpressed, unmoved.

 

The aravel burns in slow, sluggish motion. There's a sort of beauty in that, in this infinite suspension, this unending stasis of destruction. Time doesn't really move forward, but neither does it move back. It's comforting to imagine a future without agony, without pain.

 

The room expands and grows. Oddly still as tight as usual, just as it's supposed to be as in your memory, but the dimensions also seem to stretch on forever at times when you peek from the corner of your eyes—it's disorienting. Yet wherever you glance from the corner of your eye again, all things snap into place, everything reframed and back to normal.

 

Except for the flames. They are continual. They lick at your back, stroke at your neck. Curling and caressing, they dance and flick and push you forth. Something insistent seems to almost pressure you toward the door, but when you look over your shoulder there is no one there. You blink and the aravel is back to normal, no longer enflamed. Blink again and there it is—chaos in fiery form. And then to nothingness again when the flames shudder away into nonexistence.

 

This is a game. But are you meant to hide? Or run away? Your mother told you to stay out of sight. But the wagon she put you in is on fire. This is a very poor game of hide and seek. And those poor souls outside just won't shut up about you, won't stop crying out your name.

 

But how do they know your name? you think with a sudden startled jerk that you bang your knee against a beam. You scowl, pained, then start hopping in place, trying to shake off the pain.

 

It vaguely occurs to you that you must make a ridiculous sight, but at a guilty glance around your surroundings you see nobody around, so you shrug. You wish you could sit down, though, and on the wings of that thought come a solution: a cot appears behind you. You don't know how you know it's there besides knowing that wishing hard enough has apparently made it happen. That's convenient. Somehow you know if you turn around, there it'll be, waiting for you. Yearning. But some queer instinct compels you not to turn. Consequently, the cot looms large in your imagination, but that's silly. It's just a bed. Just a shem bed. A ridiculously large, oversized, overcompensating shem bed. It is furniture of gleaming, polished wood with smooth manufactured edges foreign to Dalish craft. Flickers of light gleam off its surface, winking at you.

 

Odd that it's on an aravel, but no matter. It beckons and tempts you to sit down, lay down, close your eyes in eternity and submission and rest. _Just imagine those feather-stuffed pillows_ , comes a sly voice that beckons in your mind. Never have you experienced such delights! So. _Won't you let me ferry you to sleep?_

 

For a split second, you almost do it. You're used to sleeping in tents on the ground. On the hard ground. With sharp rocks poking at your head.

 

Rocks?

 

Blood. Blood and gore matted on the back of your head. Something about that sounds right. You know the feeling of having brain matter splatter silly patterns outside of your cranium. But surely not your own. Surely not.

 

Do you?

 

Shouldn't you be dead?

 

Or maybe you're thinking about blood instead. Red makes such pretty trails down your neck—some of its yours, most of it shem.

 

Something, something, you've lost too much blood. Blood transfusions, elfroot potions, a bit of magic, but never is there enough. And then a woman says,

 

_Stay still, da'lan, stay still! Just hold on!_

 

But when you whip your head about you cannot see her. It leaves you feeling flat-footed, clumsy, and wrong. You are suddenly week-kneed, anemic. Your legs threaten to crumple you to the floor. Your knees do wobble slightly to the point that colllapsing back down on that bed is starting to sound more and more appealing. And then a woman says, a different woman says, a woman older and aged and wise and ever bitterly familiar—

 

_Listen to me. Hear my voice. Heed your lessons. You are lost, but can be found. Do not shut your ears now, my First, my Apprentice, my Da'lan._

 

 _My surrogate daughter_ , something else in you whimpers for instead.

 

How do you know these things? How are you hearing all this! Your head is starting to hurt. That sounded like—but that can't be. She isn't here. No one else is here. _Except me_ , says the sly voice instead. Flames gently nudge you toward the bed. _So stay here_.

 

_With me._

 

But the mesmerizing allure of its commands is punctured, shattered, by a shrieking chorus of a man or woman or two or three who start screaming outside even louder now, more shrill. And then, and then, that same woman says,

 

_Can you hear them, da'lan?_

 

You don't want the responsibility for their lives. So just stay inside. _Stay inside. You only have me._

 

But that can't be right. They're calling for you. You shake your head, but can't clear the fuzziness clouding your vision, throbbing in your head. This game is ridiculous! No one follows the rules. Everyone just keeps making more and more noise when they should just shut up and let you think. You just know no one is supposed to find you. You know everything will end if they do. Why should anyone look to you for rescue, mercy, salvation? You're the one always being protected. You're the one always made out to be the precious First—first in priority, first in life, cherished always. Everyone is always telling you to never be reckless with your life. So you're supposed to stay inside.

 

So you are supposed to hide from those screaming souls outside?

 

 _If you go outside_ , the voice so sweetly croons, _then wouldn't you die?_

 

After all, the rules of camouflage in the face of pursuit are—actually, you're not sure. It almost frustrates you enough to make you stamp your feet. You can't remember!

 

 _Nuisances and insects. Little crawling worms. Why can't they be quiet? Why are they so distracting? Why, oh why, when we are finally inside do they nag and nip and whine_ —

 

Be quiet. Aren't we supposed to be in hiding?

 

Any possible response has been cut off. The silence is deafening. You wonder where the voice went.

 

But surely you're not supposed to be a hypocrite and make noise yourself? That would make it too easy on your hunters, your pursuers. Once when mamae tells you to hide when there are strange unfamiliar noises outside, she scoops you up and places your huddled form among the thick winding roots of a hiding tree. But you're safe already, aren't you? What a strange doubt. Since you're already hiding, why are you remembering this now?

 

Because nobody else is hiding with you.

 

You can't help yourself. Before you know it, you have already absentmindedly counted the number of screams you hear outside, and then realize you recognize them all. Somehow. So the outside world must not be a trap. It sounds too real. Especially when your chest throbs and aches the more you are able to easily match each anguished voice back to its familiar face—a familiarity that starts to shake the cobwebs off of you. Things stop rattling so fiercely within the confines of your mind, your skull. The compulsion to turn around, lay down, and submit disappears.

 

Yet the persistent noises you hear now aren't those of strange passerby shems, but of the screams and cries of your brethren.

 

You are in an aravel. Therefore, you are part of a clan. An aravel is part of a clan just as surely as its tents. There is no need to hide inside an aravel, which is decidedly not a hiding tree.

 

This makes sense. This is making more sense than anything else has so far. Yes.

 

You need to go outside.

 

To the baker who can't resist slipping you an extra loaf for supper every time you ask. To the tanner who likes to fashion you new vestments whenever he notices your leathers wearing thin. To the hunter who takes the time to show you how to fletch your arrows, string up new guts for your bow.

 

In a clan where food is scarce and resources are scarce, with time as the scarcest and most precious of them all, people have always made time for you. They've always been kind to you, secretly devoted as they are at looking at you with stars in their eyes. Yet no matter how undeserved their praise, because you are not worthy, they keep going on and that makes you feel guilty. You want to bow, buckle, break under the collective weight of their attention and investments. You can never repay them back. You know this.

 

You know who you are. You are the silly girl way in over your head. You are drowning under the weight of this guilt. That's one thing you wish hasn't been brought back to mind.

 

But without that guilt, how would you know repay back the smith, that curmudgeonly old man? How could you have forgotten him? The one who normally gruffly keeps to himself yet still goes out of his way every month to show you the newest piece of ironbark found?

 

In a life where resources are rare and shared collectively amongst the clan, here you are with your pick of the latest rarities found. Based on their role in the clan, everyone gets a monthly allotment of precious metals and other resources to expend on the repair and order of personal equipment. But ironbark is rare enough to be withheld by the smith and only distributed at his discretion.

 

Yes, that's right. This is all right. You're remembering now.

 

Because you are one of the few able to get reserved ironbark, guaranteed, even if it is never a sizable amount. But in this life guarantees are a rare thing, and all the more precious for it, and thus this smith has always advised that you save up. He'll urge you to keep bringing all the pieces to him, so that overtime he can build you a new weapon instead of that sad splintered stick, as he calls it, you inherited so long ago. Ironbark, he declares, is the only material worth its weight. No shem can bend ironbark quite like a Dalish can. Collect enough of it and you'll see, he gloats, goading you enough times about it every year to the point it makes your eyes roll.

 

But that's precisely what happens. It takes years for you as a child to collect it, and takes even more years of him withholding the project for him to perfect it, but perfect it he does—stubbornly, willfully. By the time you hit your teenage years, it's become a running joke in the clan that the old curmudgeon will never let go of the thing, that he'll be dragging that stick with him to his grave.

 

And then comes the day, finally, when he presents you your very own staff. You almost can't believe it, but you notice there's an odd whiff of formality in the air when he gifts it to you, though. A bit of ceremony that you're surprised by. That isn't usually his way. He's usually much more blunt and frank than that. What does he care for namedays? Never once before have you seen him give a single gift to another, much less invest years of his life into someone else like he has done for you.

 

Still, you shouldn't be surprised; everyone always remembers your nameday, so keen are they to recall your birth as a miraculous event. As if the sheer accident of having magic makes you the second coming of Shartan or something. It's ridiculous. But you know why your clan so dearly clings to you. You've always shied away, embarrassed, at such reminders until you turn sullen instead with adolescence, so bleak is your secret conviction that you would never live up to the clan's image of you.

 

But when the smith remembers your nameday, it actually feels like a special event. As if you are truly cherished.

 

So when he urges you to try the weapon out, to test the heft and weight of it, to make sure it is absolutely perfect, you indulge him with all the exasperation of youth rather than actual bitterness. It's not like you're expecting anything momentous. Shows what you know. The moment you grip it in hand and start to twirl is the moment you become a fervent believer in the power of bespoke-made staves. As a true test, though, you start to wield it in conjunction with your magic, slowly at first, until you are effortlessly weaving enough spells of restoration and creation in the air to create a shimmering array of vitality and growth that prompts even wild plants to react, spurt, bloom, and glow.

 

You hardly notice, though, so willingly enthralled are you by the magic that consumes. The tapestry you create comes effortlessly to you, with the sonorous call of ancient magics slipping in silkily between every thought and emotion in wondrously easy connections. It is as if the very fabric of the Fade is in essence your own. You are an empty vessel filled anew. You dance without reservation, summon power without hesitation, and exude mana without self-consciousness. You are incandescent with joy in this moment. You sing a song of the ancestors, then, without an ounce evident of adolescent cynicism, so giddy are you by the hitherto unknown breaking of limits and rules.

 

This is the moment when some deep part of you intuits it—the Fade will never feel like this again. Magic like this can only ever be felt once in every lifetime. Until now you have never been part of something far greater than yourself, greater than your tiny insignificant form, than your singularly mortal self.

 

As the high of intoxication dies, so too does the feeling of invincible strength, incredible power, that mighty conviction in the impossibility of containment and constraints. But you are already becoming smaller now and can hardly remember what you just were. It'd be heartbreaking, if the experience hasn't already been cataloged in the theoretical sense, because as soon you try again to grasp a second impression of that intoxicating power, the memory of such is already slipping away. The harder you hold onto it, the faster it flees.

 

Even your final attempt to snatch away even the barest trace of that magic is half-hearted at best. No point in trying to taste it to relieve the moment and convince yourself of its reality because it has already faded fast. You are resigned to it, to being frustrated by the fleeting nature of revelation. You can only weakly chase after it, as it flits away already in the farthest reaches of your mind wherein fast forgotten dreams upon awakening become transformed instead into half-remembered memories.

 

And yet, even though the moment is gone, it leaves you happy still.

 

And so when you finish your dance, when you gasp and heave from your glorious exertions, when you return back to consciousness itself, that's when you notice you have drawn a crowd and for the first time you just don't care. Your eyes wildly rove for one person and one person alone—the smith—who you are shocked to discovered is crying, weeping proud glimmering tears.

 

You are struck by this image. It'll be something you will never forget. And you are yet again stunned by the thought that this smith is in fact the last from proud old Clan Lavellan in the days when it openly roamed free—so confident in its own strength and magic, so careless in its open hubris and snubbing of humans.

 

And then came the purge, the stories like to ceaselessly remind you.

 

A whole clan, gutted.

 

A whole generation, culled.

 

The clan is dying now because of that. The near extinction of artisans and craftsmen is just one more consequence of that. With not enough new babies born to the clan, there are not enough promising youths. And among those promising youths, there are even less capable of taking on apprenticeships as complex as the forge. And even if there are, so many are needed instead for the hunting or fishermen tracks. A clan can survive with just one smith, after all. But the clan cannot survive in the absence of food.

 

And so the smiths die off one by one before they are able to pass on their craft, their secrets dying with them. June weeps at the shameful weakening of his craft while Dirthamen crows at every strengthening of his own. And a distinct lack of mages in the clan, it's been even harder to hold onto increasingly esoteric knowledge like the art of the staff. The ancient ways of production for magical conduits are rare enough as they are without grim modern necessity excising it from further practice and remembrance.

 

The years just keep chipping away at Dalish inheritance. But no longer. Clan Lavellan has long paid the price for its folly. The clan may be dying a slow death decades in the making, but today it has never been more alive.

 

You remember fondly that he will loudly deny letting even a single tear drop. He'll scowl and fix immediate accusing glares upon anybody trying to hide their snickers poorly. But in reality some inner contentment will simmer in his being, occasionally rising up to tug up the corners of his lips in damned displays of happiness.

 

When your own mother is often too busy for you, when your own father may be regretful but nonetheless keeps parting from you, there is the old man and the hand he rests upon your shoulder. He will never hug you. He will never embrace you close like kin. Even now, not once, has he ever said anything to the effect of _lathan na_ or _ma vhen'an_. The closest he'll ever come to acknowledging his love for you is to grumpily call you _da'lan_. Your Keeper calls you that, too, but never in so secretly fond a tone.

 

In a clan where everybody else raises you so high above themselves, you may as well be a drifting wisp of a cloud, your smith has always taken it upon himself to drag you back down. He will never call you friend. He will never call you daughter.

 

Yet all that pales in comparison to the way he looks upon you in the quiet moments shared between the two of you. Moments that allow to breathe into creation subtextual spaces of contemplation wherein words are meaningless, gestures are worthy, but the truth can be found in the unseen, unheard, unsaid underpinnings of silence.

 

After such a moment of stunned silence at the demonstration of your new staff, the clan rushes forward to enthusiastically greet and congratulate you on your new weapon, spells, control, and magical displays. As they surge upon you, crashing forth like an overwhelming tidal wave, you need only to ignore everyone and search out his gaze in order to feel calm.

 

And there he is.

 

He stands there weeping and meets your eyes freely, with nary a sliver of shame.

 

_This is for you._

 

 

 

 

Later, as the crowd dies down and individuals start to stagger to bed, when an impromptu celebration leading to spontaneous rounds of drinks will have soundly closed the night, this smith of yours will go on and keep on drinking. The clan has built a roaring fire pit just for this occasion where the meat is roasting and the fish are crisping, and he has kept you occupied all this time. He pulls you down now to sit at his side. He will enthuse to you and lecture you about the proper care, maintenance, and handling of your new ironbark staff. With drink-rosy cheeks, he'll go on and on about the beauty of its subtle carving, the ways in which you can further smooth out its grip to prevent any splinters from forming outright. Your smith's enthusiasm, so rarely seen, will make his worn-house face crinkle with delight in the dusk of the night, as he effusively expounds upon the beauty of magical weaponry, how the relative difficulty in manipulating ironbark oftentimes end up paying even more untold dividends.

 

Then he'll get a little more rowdy, a bit more nostalgic, at remembering the earlier days of his bloodthirsty youth in which he gifted all his mage spy friends clever new weapons to assist them better at navigating shem lands. He will go on to describe the many, many ways on how to obfuscate, disguise, confuse, distract attention from obvious magical signatures by hiding them behind seemingly mundane facades—from sticks, to stones, to slingshots, to brooms, to little paring knives found in the toolset of any commoner. Anything can be made a conduit, he posits. How energizing a mundane object actually is, though, depends on the materials used to craft it and the right temperament found in the right mage.

 

And of course he can create actual weaponry, the usual assortment of daggers and blades and bows, all of which he will dismiss before swerving quickly into great effusive detail of the many many ways in which you can gut a man with a staff, starting with knowing how to properly graft metal to shaft in order to be able to attach new wicked blades at its very tip for physical melee.

 

 _Crystals are too obvious_ , he will crow to anyone who will listen as he sloshes his drink around. _Effective, but not cunning at all! Shems will always underestimate our silly Dalish sticks. Isn't it so much better to stab your opponent first and watch his face fall when tries to pull it out only for him to discover, too late, it's electrified?_

 

You are enjoying this memory. You are caught up in the emotions of it all. His gesticulations and mannerisms are so out of character, driven as he is by triumph, pride, and drink. Flames soar wildly into the air, casting great flickering shadows against the forest floor. The logs of the glowing pit are eaten away when one suddenly creaks, unsettles, breaks in half.

 

Like the snapping of a wooden beam. The creaking of an aravel.

 

The fire pit should not be this bright, you realize. It would be too noticeable. It acts as a beacon in the night. Your eyes flicker around the clearing, at its hidden dark spaces veiled from you.

 

The clan would never build a pyre this high—a pyre?

 

A pyre?

 

Consuming so much more organic matter now than burnt up blackened logs or the sizzle of smoking fish. Yet no new meat is being cooked.

 

But the air still smells of acrid flesh.

 

The forest surrounding you looms larger. Green blotted walls encroaching upon you now.

 

Your smith is still recounting tales to anyone who will hear, but you're not listening anymore. Alarmed, you stand.

 

Then he turns, stopping you short. His face remains as enthusiastic as ever, but your mouth goes dry. His back is to the flames, his face cast in shadows. Your dearest friend's face is set in an unfamiliar mien. That's when you know something is wrong.

 

There is a gleam in his eyes. His expression is a little more eerie, a little hungry. The already weakened, slackened grip you have on a tankard you don't remember holding loosens even more.

 

It falls. His coiled up form suddenly strikes, his hand snatching out to catch it mid-swipe. He holds out his prize. Not a single fluid ounce sloshes out now. Your breath catches in your throat.

 

 _You're so powerful_ , he says, smiling. _Have you always been so powerful? If only we were all so powerful._

 

He would never have boasted about you like this once, you think, numb.

 

The funeral pyre licks up high in the air, crowning his head in flames.

 

This is all wrong. The Dalish bury their dead, and then plant a tree. But there is no tree here. Everything has been set aflame.

 

The smith is a standing, burning corpse with a mouth spread out wide in a rictus of emotion, a mockery of love. His teeth gleams while his eyes watch. He opens his arms in welcome, an invitation to an embrace that would never have occurred. This is a corruption of memory. It hurts. It hurts to look directly into his face.

 

Clawing branches crackle and snap to reshape and reform around your being into recognizable wooden walls and roof. And all the while this transformation occurs, the forest becomes closed to you, disappearing out of sight as the walls of a wagon cage rapidly surge forth to envelop you and swallow you whole.

 

 _I'll find you_ , sings the smith to the mage. His lips part more as if to taunt, but what comes out his throat instead is the sound of a hundred overlapping voices pleading, begging, and crying. The shrill sound and dirge of a clan dying.

 

A door swings into place, slamming shut on the sight, cutting off the noise, locking you indoors. The walls of the aravel have fully reshaped and reformed around you. But you can still hear the corpse scream. The aravel burns even as the din cannot be ignored. Then one voice rises above the rest.

 

The old man begs.

 

You cannot believe your ears. The smith is pleading for you, sobbing for you.

 

And this is the moment you realize you are in the Fade. Because outside the burning aravel you're stuck within, where all the screaming din is happening, you can hear that old man beg. And that really is in the realms of true impossibility.

 

You've seen him cry once; he's already used up his allotment of strong emotion in a lifetime.

 

The corpse outside is not really him. You know it can't be, that it simply couldn't be. It is a demon. It must be. No other answer is acceptable to you now.

 

He asks to know why you have forsaken the clan.

 

He demands to know whether you are going to leave him.

 

But the real smith? The real one would save himself. And, barring escape, the real one would much rather grit his teeth than wail. To spite his captors, he would just kill himself outright and be done with it than to allow himself to be reduced to this sobbing mess. You are greatly offended on his behalf; in real life circumstances, there would be no bargaining with the man.

 

He is Dalish, after all. Part of the old guard that has long convinced itself that there can be only be pride in death were it in service to defiance.

 

Because he would die before he'd ever grovel. He'd never break under a little torture or when faced with the certainty of death. In the face of templar executioners, in the face of all their questions and demands, he'd never give up his life for something so trivial and demeaning.

 

But he would, you realize quite suddenly, give his life for yours.

 

There are templars out there.

 

The walls of the aravel stutter, jerk, then go still. Your mouth goes dry. Your mind becomes startlingly sober and clear. All noise suspends, slow, like freshly fallen snow dampening the world.

 

That's when you notice it—the silence.

 

No one is screaming anymore.

 

The sudden horror of it is inescapable. There is only silence. Not the good kind either. There is only Silence. There is only Silence.

 

Mamae, mamae, are we no longer playing now?

 

Be quiet. Be still. Be as insignificant as a mouse. Don't move, don't breathe, don't think. Just freeze.

 

There are templars outside the door.

 

Somehow you know this as inescapably as you know the unseen sky is green: they've found you, they are here to kill you, they are here to murder you.

 

The truth of it resounds in your being. Your conviction of such is so convincing, so unnerving, that you believe in this threat they represent wholeheartedly, completely, utterly. You are focused only on listening, waiting, with baited breath.

 

You shiver then huddle within the folds of your clothes. You find yourself hiding in a corner of the aravel, tucked away underneath a table, tucked away from the smokey flames, but you don't remember how you got there. Everything looms so much larger than you. The monsters are coming to find you. They've set the aravel on fire.

 

You blink. Fire should not be green, you think. Something about the color injects a bit of fear in you, but you don't know, can't know, will not recall why.

 

When did the roaring light of the aravel surrounding you turn green?

 

Something about the color tells you that you should feel more afraid. Shouldn't you be more afraid?I t's a truth as unnerving as knowing there are templars outside the door. You are itching to do something, take some action, as there is some renewed agitation crawling along your skin. You ought to do something even if it's to go outside. Because maybe then the flames out there will be back to its meandering whimsy shades of orange, yellow, red, red, red.

 

As in blood. As in danger.

 

A threat.

 

So what does it mean when viridian starts feeling more dangerous than red?

 

You pat the back of your head, but feel only greasy locks, no blood.

 

That's right. You are in the Fade. Did you forget again? Comprehension gets so hazy here. Clarity slips away with half a thought. It's difficult to remember, but remember this: _You are in the Fade_. There. You said it. Now let it ring with truth.

 

If only it were so easy to banish your fears.

 

You imagine some hysterical part of you must have pulled aside the Fade earlier and asked it pretty please, oh so nicely, to manifest only one fatal threat at a time so as to not overwhelm you. There are only so many representations of your death you can handle all at once right now, thank you. It is taking all the willpower in every pore of your being, as it is, to keep from breaking down into wails.

 

Sweat beads at your temple, the slick salty trails of them crawling their way down your cheek in an emulation of tears.

 

It gives you an idea. For want of nothing better to do, you start crawling on your hands and knees through a maze of slats and beams. You must reach the door. Hissing flames attempt to block your way at each gap, each crevice. With the wave of an impatient hand, they part, and you reach forward to open the door only for the handle to snap right off. You throw it away, then start banging at the door. That's when you notice your hands.

 

They are child size hands. Have you been a child this whole time? No wonder you've been stricken with the rambling delusions and remembrance of the Fade. Memories of childhood will always try to make you stray just as surely as demons will.

 

You grimace when you remember the image of the smith made corrupt.

 

But still. You can't help but notice that something is wrong. Even more so than usual, you mean.

 

Yes, you are now in the clumsy, stubby fingered form as a child. But when you don't recognize your own skin, that's a problem. It's a small inconsistency in a realm full of them, but why this? Why now? So you stare.

 

Your skin now chars and cracks as it melts. Your hands are melting.

 

Are you for whom the pyre burns?

 

Your eyes immediately squeeze shut, but then you roughly shake your head. This isn't real. Nothing is true. Believe in nothing but yourself. You are not in actual pain. Still, you brace yourself.

 

Everything is melting. Your hands, your arms, your torso and legs. As you lift your fingers to inspect this phenomena even closer, you can see flayed strings of muscle, ligaments, and fat stretch out and snap until they fall limp and saggy from knuckles to wrists to elbows and arms, with every exposed inch revealing more and more of your stripped inner being.

 

Skin keeps peeling back. Muscles are flayed in layers. You are disintegrating. The Fade is going to have to try harder than that. You are almost fascinated with the way strips of your pale white flesh hangs loose, moving slightly under the own sway of its saggy weight. In the extreme heat of the aravel flames that you only know notice, pustules and drippings of fat sizzle and pop away. What doesn't burn away splatter, falling to the wooden slats on the aravel floor, creating such a mess. Your mother would scold you for that. Still, their drip drips keep falling between its cracks, awakening something underneath.

 

Something stirs. Some entity beneath the floor. Another demon? Time to end this charade. You goad the entity on. It's a mistake.

 

You think it just another demon, but you are wrong.

 

With a flicking gesture from yourself, more tender slabs of meat start peeling off to the floor only to be ripped apart by unseen hands, by sharp splintered debris, until these awkward quivering chunks rapidly shrivel to pieces after that in the white hot heat. But some hidden bits, shivering in corners and under wooden beams, remain seeping bloody raw—uncooked, untouched. These splattered growths eventually untangle themselves to reveal their true forms: pulsating hearts and organs, a wet miasma of fat. In the broken shadows of the collapsing aravel, they haven't been found yet. They haven't melted. They haven't been licked up yet. But something is moving beneath the floorboards—too soon do these squeezing globules also get suddenly sucked away by an unknown force. In a panic, the rest scatter. Now exposed, any other squirming bits of sentience left suddenly attempt to flee into other such dark tight spaces like so many little ants when one by one are they inevitably slurped away by invisible lips, which give a resounding gluttonous smack.

 

You blink once and out from the floor morphs an abomination. From countless tiny drops of burnt up viscera comes a hundred chitinous eyes, beady and black, the flesh surrounding them the pale color of sour milk, fleshy fat, while hungry teeth grow green and furred with the stink of meaty mold. These teeth clack and chitter away at you, as spindly limbs rapidly swarm out from underneath the floorboards, too, as well as your skin. They've been inside you all along. You've been with you all along. You suck in a breath.

 

 _Oh_ , you think. You would really like to leave the Fade now, please. Now wake up.

 

Wake up.

 

Please.

 

But you can't.

 

Real panic grows. It should only take willpower to open the door. You have to get out now. You have to leave now. You reach for your magic, but you have no power here. Who are you fooling? You fall down to the floor—oh, Creator, the seeping weeping _floor_ —and scrabble backward hard when your back hits a cot.

 

A bed. A shem bed.

 

In an aravel.

 

Crooning and simpering at you, with the corners of wiggling feather-light pillow stroking upward to reach you.

 

Skin crawls now when it hasn't before. Some instinct of terror drives you to scrabble and rear back, but there is nowhere else go. You are so small. You jerk to your feet and start to lunge for the door. Your efforts renewed to escape, however, are in vain. They are all in vain.

 

You are thrashing and clawing at a door with no handle.

 

 _Just a dream_ , you chant. _It's all a dream_. _The monster isn't here_. _The aravel isn't here._ But your hysteria grows more and more, louder and louder, screeching at you the more you try to fool no one.

 

You are in the Fade. You are a mage, you are fine, and you are only dreaming, yes, only dreaming. Dreaming. But are you? Are you really? The whisper that hisses in your ears says it is not so, that perhaps it is your clan that is the pretty dream. _So how do you know for sure?_ You pivot, slap at your ear, convinced a little worm has burrowed inside your ear, but what a mistake! Your back is to the door while the monster is before you clear now in all its glory. It pulsates. It stares. Or is it a hundred bulbous eyes that blink back at you instead?

 

Its body constantly shifts and morphs as it comes near, splaying apart a multitude and pairs of insectoid arms, spreading them wide in welcome. It grows taller, thinner, lankier in form.

 

The monster leans in close.

 

_You don't know what it is you don't know what it is you don't know what it is_

 

The door was never meant to be opened, you realize now. You've rejected it, see, yes? Don't you see? There was never a door in the first place. Never the faintest hope of it even opening. That other world has already been lost. There is no hope.

 

There is only the impossibility of escape. This is why you have stopped your stupid, worthless struggle over the door. It is futile. This is known. You are nothing. You are a wriggling little worm in the face of incomprehensible power. It could crush you underfoot without even noticing. The monster looms so large and great indeed, so terrible to behold, that this and only this this shall ever be your reality.

 

To your back is no threshold to freedom. It is futility. Just accept it. Give in to despair and collapse to the floor for denial has been your last shield, but look how feebly you cling to it now. So shield your eyes, grip your face, tear at your hair, and wail.

 

Denial has been cracked for some time now, and so has your mind, but you recognize that it is in this one last grasp for sanity where you perch upon a precipice as your mind wavers over whether or not to let the wool drop from your eyes.

 

Because you've been telling yourself all this time that you don't know what's really happening out past that door, but that's a lie. You've chosen to ignore the truth.

 

 _Because if you leave_ , hisses the monster knowingly, _you won't like what you see_.

 

You keep ignoring it still. There is only death waiting outside. You are so scared.

 

Four shriveled arms deftly reach behind you and pull you in by the waist, dragging you flush against its own form. You wail, but this is reality now. The more you struggle, the more you slough off more of your fat and skin, which serves to do nothing else but to feed the creature even more as it continues to consume the fleshy discarded parts of you. Even now it nibbles away at your jawline and cheek until it works its way up to one long sensitive ear.

 

It nips at the tip. You shudder. And despair.

 

 _We can be monsters together_ , _you and I_ , it whispers to you, slurping and gorging upon the terror of you.

 

But the most terrible thing is in how its massive form curls around your little body—the way it grips your face with one of those many black spindly limbs, the ends of which sprouts fingertip pads, gooey with the sweat of you. It reaches for your mouth, daintily dips a point in between, then pulls out. Spreads fluid on your lips. You want to gag. This is not love.

 

As it cuddles you close and croons, smoothing back your hair, it ties a silken white ribbon in your locks. But this is no pretty gift to be bequeathed by a lover. Stained as it is by the profane touch, the fabricated length now rapidly molds and decays into the mottled grey of your innocence. You are a doll at the whims of its many limbs when the creature manipulates you into an embrace, wrestles you into bed. In its gluttony it would suck you dry until there is nothing left but bones, until you are reduced to a quivering mass of marrow. You close your eyes.

 

The old man smith would be so disappointed in you.

 

You open them. There is the monster hovering above you, spreading your legs. An extra ghastly protrusion from its back reaches over to slice a path down the valley of your prepubescent breasts. Your clothes split apart at the seams upon its unholy intent. Sticky fingers are everywhere as it suckles your chest, grips your hips, and plunges, and plunges, and gives a guttural moan—and it is so unnatural, so tight, you want to scream.

 

There is only defiance in death.

 

You are crying until you are snarling, and then you are wrenching yourself from its grasp, spitting at its face. You roar for your staff, it materializes, and the demon screeches when you swing it around and bury a bladed tip deep into its flesh. You rip, you tear, you claw; so monstrous are you in your hate that you don't stop. You defile and defy its presence by splitting it apart asunder. Sour black ichor gushes forth from its wounds and sprays onto your face, your shorn clothes, as it screams and screams while you slash away at it in rage, and then fling back toward the door.

 

Dribbles of red blood fleck away from your thighs and onto the floor while you flee. You have no time for sorrow.

 

Oily fingers latch onto your shoulder, but in one deft move you pivot, lower your center of gravity, and stab upwards at an angle.

 

In the Fade willpower is everything. It does not matter if you are small. It does not matter if any foe would have normally been able to physically overpower you.

 

With one great thrust of the blade, you rip up through an elongated, obscene, white throat. The creature flails while it is speared on your weapon, scrambling for any purchase anywhere on the smooth heft of your weapon so as to yank it out, but it can't. You've always kept your staff in pristine condition. You've always listened to the old man. So you ready yourself, feign weakness, let it slip limp from your grip, and then when it starts tearing the bladed end from its throat and shrieking in triumph is when you suddenly strike, having summoned a knife in your other hidden hand.

 

It failed to kill a templar once; it will not fail you again.

 

You stab its face, cheek, neck. Wherever one protruding eyeball out of a hundred pops out of the folds of its roiling skin is where you stab and stab again.

 

The creature wriggles, hisses, and recoils from you, but it is trapped under the sheer flurry of your blows. It is nothing more than an open wound filled with a flapping, flopping, ineffectual tongue, and you are filled with nothing but contempt. Death rattles from a gulping, ventilated esophagus, and it is only now you see it for what it really is—a pathetic, mewling avatar of fear. It serves its god of nightmares, but you care not for the power it once held over you because you are already dead.

 

So as it attempts to flee from you, as it writhes and stews in its own pulsating terror of you, you throw yourself upon it before it can wriggle away into the darkened cracks between the floorboards. You straddle its squealing form, wrestle it close with one hand while raising your knife with the other, and then plunge your blade down into its gut, slicing upward from belly to torso, exposing black and shriveled intestines. But you are most interested in its stomach. You set about your grim task, create a slit in the organ, then discard the knife and thrust your hands deep in its inner workings. You peel back the edges of the slit to expose an open raw wound. In the midst of pooling puddles of its sticky black ichor are the eaten tenants within, quivering for you.

 

The demon moans once, low, and attempts to dissipate and slink away. You don't let it. You seize its neck in place with one glowing hand. Droplets of blood begin to rise and hover in the air around you, taken from the demon, the floor, and your own form. From between your legs, you siphon up the womb blood, too. Then while still griping the creature you slowly lift your other glowing hand, concentrate, make a fist, and command the dead.

 

From the hole you have created, the distended stomach spews and vomits back out the digested parts of you. Some hit your body. They cling like they've come home. The rest of the bits dribble of their own accord out onto the floor where they then rapidly coalesce into more discernible flecks and pieces—strips of muscle, some flayed skin. They crawl up your legs to reach and join with the missing pits of your disintegrated flesh in order to reconstitute your form, restored. Your limbs lengthen and grow until you are made whole again, until you are no longer in helpless child form.

 

Forbidden magic, perhaps. But you're no longer the gentle healer you once were.

 

You release your necromantic hold, but the body holds, and your newly wrought flesh is bare of all bruises and cuts now from the templar's vicious assault. That fight feels so long ago now. The field is a distant memory, and that shem village may as well not exist at all for all that it feels so faraway.

 

Your concentrate slips. The demon slithers out from underneath you then bursts into a haze of viridian green, but you don't allow it to go. You send a message by snatching its essence in the air, grip it tight, and then set it aflame on the wings of crimson, orange hues. It shrieks as it burns, crumbling to naught but ash and dust. It calls to its god, and then you are alone.

 

The air is cloudy with smoke until it dissipates. The green aravel flames encroach upon you even closer, but the warm glowing fire cupped in your trembling hands protects you, keeps back the rival flames. It morphs and grows until your magic in fireball form reaches out to nuzzle away the tears from your shining cheeks as you begin to weep with relief.

 

You kneel, lean back, and close your eyes. You hum deep in your throat while you wait for death to come. You are ready. You keep letting your fire grow and grow, as all blood in the room is consumed in service to its glow. You wait for the true end. You just want it all to end. You don't bother with escape.

 

You want to burn away to nothingness instead.

 

Something rumbles outside the door. The aravel begins shaking violently at this new arrival. A pitiless being now darkens its threshold, and green shadows sweep indoors like a rushing tide from underneath the door. Every other open sliver in the walls, every space, not completely sealed against the Fade now also glows a brilliant green from the oncoming storm.

 

Your message has been delivered. You have an appointment to keep. No point in waiting. You open your eyes.

 

The walls crack, splinter, then shatter apart in a blinding iridescent show of power. Sheer emerald radiance instantly blinds you, whites out your vision, until the sight of an unholy god is hovering before you.

 

In the Fade there is a monstrous gaping maw. You meet its multitude of cold, black eyes boldly for this is the end, you are resolved, and you respond to such by parting your hands, with each wildly aglow in flames.

 

 _And so your people are dead_ , it intones. _I could have saved them all._

 

You ignore it, focus, and then let loose your tenuous hold. Too late does the god realize your intent until all control suddenly snaps and collapses upon the tide of magic that swells up in you, as it rushes and pours out of you, releases from you in the ultimate manifestation of pyrrhic flames unhindered by inhibitions, reservations, and self-preservation. This is to be your first and final act as a Dalish First, after all. This will be how you avenge your clan.

 

In mutual destruction, there is a deafening roar. The world is nothing but fire and blood that wraps around your form, suffocating you, until you are naught but a corpse. You've only ever been a corpse. Everything is a twirl of complete and total chaos. The god seems moved to respond by the sheer audacity of your actions alone, the sheer futility of it all.

 

There is only refuge in madness. You are prepared to go screaming, vindictive, into the night.

 

It is not to be so. Before the god can crush you, before your flames can even try lashing out, some white hot sigil abruptly carves itself into the flesh of your chest and _burns_. It's real. It's more real than anything else you've experienced thus far—a sudden, searing agony that distracts and consumes all words, all thought, until you only just notice as everything ephemeral and viridian dissipates like so much useless smoke.

 

The last thing you hear is the nightmare god's enraged thrashing howls as its victory is spoiled, your life is stolen, when all consciousness is yanked from the Fade.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So did I do the Fade justice?


End file.
